Philosophy and Literature in Conversation: Human Limitation and the Transcendent Good in Finite and Infinite Goods, Love's Knowledge, and "Cathedral"​Emma McDonald, MA(c), Yale Divinity SchoolStudent Essay Runner Up

In Finite and Infinite Goods, Robert Merrihew Adams argues that all human conceptions of the Good are incomplete and imperfect because the Good transcends our properties, understanding, and conceptions. (1)However, Adams also believes, following Plato, that when we value something as good (i.e., something that is “worthy of love or admiration”), we glimpse the Good itself. (2)Thus, he argues for an experiential grounding of the transcendent Good, meaning that our apprehension of a beautiful sunset or an admirable athletic feat can be understood as an experience of the Good (an argument he borrows from Plato). Because Adams is a theist, he considers these experiences to be a glimpse of the glory of God. (3)Though he affirms these glimpses, he continues to acknowledge the difficulty in saying anything meaningful about the Good, citing Iris Murdoch: “Good is indefinable...because of the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality.” (4)Adams and Murdoch have much to say about the Good, but both agree that it goes far beyond what they are able to say about it. They agree with literary theorists like Frank Burch Brown and Karl Jaspers that metaphysical systems point beyond themselves. (5)In response to this mystery, Jaspers, Burch Brown, and Murdoch turn to literature. Burch Brown argues for a dialogical relationship between theology and literature because he believes that the imaginative capabilities of poetic art can pick up where the metaphysical system leaves off. (6) In other words, where the metaphysical system reaches its depth and runs out of words, literature can go deeper and lead metaphysics into new depths. (7) In this essay, I will put Adams’ argument on transcendence in dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s argument about the relationship between transcendence, humanity, and form to advocate for the importance of literary form to philosophical thinking. Taking my own advice, I will then examine Raymond Carver’s story Cathedral to illuminate some fruitful possibilities borne of a conversation between these two modes of understanding. ​​1 Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50.2 Ibid.3 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 51. 4 Ibid., 82.5 Frank Burch Brown, Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 178.6 Burch Brown, Transfiguration, 178.7 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 14.